The life of a silent film fan

[klaatu]

For some reason I find myself fascinated with what it was like, once upon a time, to be a movie fan during the silent era. I think, by the early 20's, it was not unlike being a fan now, minus some technology like TV's, VCR's, DVD's & the Internet. By the 20's the nickelodeons were gone, replaced by various strata of movie houses. Feature films were edging out shorts. The movies themselves were more mature.

But earlier things were much diffrerent. What's always fascinated me is seeing what sort of difference the introduction of moving images as entertainment made in a world that:

(a) had never seen pictures move before

(b) was just beginning to get a sense of leisure in a culture where, until recently, life was composed of either working or sleeping unless it was Sunday

(c) in order to view this new entertainment you had to sit in a dark room with people who may not have been of your class - immigrants, drunks, thieves and members of various races sat with the sons and daughters of privlege and status.

What follows is a poem by LaTouche Hanthingy that ran under the name “The Motion Picture Fan” in Motion Picture Story Magazine in August, 1913. It's about the newest social disease - the movie fan!

He’s a spunky little fellow, without a trace of yellow,
He knows his motion picture A,B,C.
He rivals all the sages, and accurately gauges
The films that will be pleasing to a “T.”

He’s very free with strictures, on inappropriate pictures,
On every mechanism he’s au fait.
He can talk about the locus, of the fluctuating focus,
And let you know the minute it’s O.K.

Should he discourse on shutters, - every word he utters,
You’ll find he won’t make much of a mistake.
His original disclosures, on powder and exposures,
Are anything, believe me, but a fake.

So on ad inifinitum, you’ll find there’s not an item,
On which He will not have his little say,
He’s business-like, and handy, in fact, he’s quite a dandy,
The hero of the motion picture day!

Here's a description of a rabid fan named Mary Curtin. She was the 18-year-old daughter of a Columbus, Ohio car dealer. A friend wrote about her in a letter to Motion Picture Magazine. It was published in November, 1916. Mary “has never known to witness less than 30 movies a week” Her room is decorated with 450-500 movie star pictures She went to the movies every day during her lunch period. She insisted that dates take her to the movies before fraternity dances, and she often lingered so long they’d miss the dance. Mary wasn’t shy or introverted. She was quite popular. “She has converted many to her habit of almost living at the movies, but none as yet surpassed her record.” She jokingly claimed, “the man I marry must be twice the movie fan I am.” When someone warned her that she might remain single with those restrictions, “she gave Eva Tanguay’s famous cry, ‘I don’t care.’”

Finally, here's a New England film exchange man named Frank Harris. He defined a movie fan as “one that attends the theater every day, at least once a day, if not two or three times.”

Based on the yard stick I'm just a wannabe film fan. Oh well.

[Jess]

klaatu said:

Based on the yard stick I'm just a wannabe film fan. Oh well.

I think I'm only a wannabe, too

That poem is great! I've always been fascinated by early film fans. Even with the internet and all the magazines we have access to now, I envy the fans of the 20's who had Photoplay and Motion Picture Classic, etc., because they had a treasure trove of photos they could choose from to plaster on their walls. It's really neat to think of the actors from those days who were fans themselves. Clara wrote letters to fan magazines when she was young, and Greta Garbo hung around outside the stage door when Carl Brisson was performing. Even the stars were starstruck

[scottlord]

Please try to read The Art of The Moving Picture by Vachel Lindsey written in 1915.
After that there's the 400 page One Thousand and One Nights, by Terry Ramsaye, but you can read mostly the second 200 pages.

Thanks,

Scott Lord

www.geocities.com/lord02141/scottlord2.html

[scottlord]

Jess is right, Garbo gave a rose to Brisson.

[silentgreg]

I remember reading about a tribe who had never seen motion pictures before. They were shown a movie projected on a screen. When the camera moves around they thought that the whole building that they were in must be moving around instead of just the image on the screen.

Another interesting thing is how different cultures thought about motion pictures when they first started. For instance the lack of sound and poor quality tended to be viewed by American's as defects as it lacked the features of the real world. Russian critics tended to view things differently. For example there is this quote by Maxim Gorky:

"If only you knew how strange it felt. There were no sounds and no colours. Everything - earth, trees, people, water, air - was portrayed in a grey monotone: in a grey sky there were grey rays of sunlight; in grey faces - grey eyes, and the leaves of the tree were grey like ashes . . . Silently the ash-grey foliage of the trees swayed in the wind and the grey silhouettes of the people glided silently along the grey ground, as if condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being deprived of all life's colours."

It's interesting because instead of seeing the characteristics of the early motion pictures as technical defects he sees them as being able to change the world into a sort of bizarro universe.

Sorry, I'm sort of blabbering on. I've just been reading a book "Early Cinema in Russia" for my website (www.silentmoviesblog.com).